Good Movies with Narration

[Stewball]

(Carried over from another forum where it would've gotten lost.)

A Clockwork Orange (Maybe the best narration ever.)
The Tree of Life
(500) Days of Summer (voice of God almost, where the explanation at the end was absolutely necessary)
Act of Valor
Savages "Just because I'm telling you this story doesn't mean I'm alive at the end of it."
Life of Pi
Glory
Ratatouille
The Brave One (sort of working the narration into the story, like they do with music in some musicals, to cut down on the critical whining. )
The Details
Apocalypse Now
Stranger Than Fiction (another like The Brave One)
The Big Red One
Idiocracy
Adaptation
Tombstone
Moulin Rouge
Forrest Gump
A Christmas Story
Memento
Shawshank Redemption
The Notebook
Sucker Punch
The Usual Suspects
Sin City
The Beach
Magnolia
Fight Club
Watchmen
The Great Gatsby
Looper
Lolita
Citizen Kane
Alice's Restaurant
All About Eve
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Big Lebowski
Platoon
Lord of War
Trainspotting
Blade Runner
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
L.A. Confidential
Pi
Barry Lyndon
Easy A
Don Jon
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Irrational Man
.....and just about every film noire movie ever made.

[frederic_g54]

Little Children's wry narration, you should give it a watch.

[Stewball]

Little Children's wry narration, you should give it a watch.

I will, thx.

[DukeOfOmnium]

Sunset Blvd

[mattorama12]

It looks like a few movies with great narration are missing from your list. I mentioned Goodfellas in the other thread, the narration of which starts with the great line, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." Another two movies with great narration (one of which is heavily influenced by the other) are Snatch and Layer Cake. Another missing classic is Annie Hall, which uses narration (and breaking the 4th wall) to great comedic effect.

[Stewball]

It looks like a few movies with great narration are missing from your list. I mentioned Goodfellas in the other thread, the narration of which starts with the great line, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." Another two movies with great narration (one of which is heavily influenced by the other) are Snatch and Layer Cake. Another missing classic is Annie Hall, which uses narration (and breaking the 4th wall) to great comedic effect.

Yeah, Snatch definitely. Don't remember it being narrated (if it was by Brad Pitt's character that's probably why ) and Layer Cake is on my to do list tonight, good cast what with Daniel Craig and Tom Hardy on their way up, and Sienna Miller on her way..... well, y'know--though she was great in the great two person dialogue movie, Interview. Buscemi seem to really enjoy dissing and needling her. Goodfellas and Annie Hall are on my meh list. I don't know why I don't like Woody Allen flicks that much, I enjoy dialogue. Yes I do know why, he's in 'em, and they're usually b&w, which is OK once in a while but.... Pro'lly why I liked Midnight in Paris, oh, and I liked the opening to Manhattan. I'll stop now.

Wait, they want $15 to buy the HD VOD, no rentals! Back to the drawing boards. Ah, found a used Bluray for the usual rental price, which means I'll have to wait though. Sorry if this is starting to sound like a Facebook post. NOW I'll stop.

[Ag0stoMesmer]

Terminator 2 (1991) -these really are spoilers, be careful.


First words
[spoiler]Sarah Connor: [narrating] Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Sarah Connor: [narrating] Dyson listened while the Terminator laid it all down: Skynet, Judgment Day, the history of things to come. It's not everyday you find out that you're responsible for 3 billion deaths. He took it pretty well.
Miles Dyson: I feel like I'm gonna throw up.[/spoiler]
Last words
[spoiler]Sarah Connor: [narrating] The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.[/spoiler]

There's a memorble bit of voiceover too
[spoiler]Sarah Connor: [voiceover] Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator, would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.[/spoiler]

[Stewball]

Yeah, that's a good example. The third one is particularly appropriate, but of course some would say a summation is always extraneous, like we don't need poets or soothsayers to emphasize the obvious, or to bring the not so obvious to the surface.

[Ag0stoMesmer]

Yeah, that's a good example. The third one is particularly appropriate, but of course some would say a summation is always extraneous, like we don't need poets or soothsayers to emphasize the obvious, or to bring the not so obvious to the surface.

I think that third one definitely added something that would have been missing from the movie otherwise;
[spoiler]I'm not sure the Terminator did learn anything about 'the value of human life', the young Connor simply programmed it to not kill. If he'd asked it to murder every human it saw it would have complied no? This (uncharacteristically sentimental) speech from Sarah either voiced her characters relief after years of preparation and fear or was Cameron speaking directly through her, asking us all to be a bit nicer to each other.[/spoiler]
Whichever it was of those or something else, without that speech I would never have read the movie in that way.

[adrian]

Badlands